Writing Responsibly

A couple of articles I’ve read recently have got me thinking about a tough issue in poetry, and I suppose in all forms of art. It’s the question of how to address the real, wide world and all its shortcomings in a way that does justice to the ugliness and to the art form itself. As an editor I’ve seen a lot of rants arranged on the page as poetry and novels that are thinly disguised vehicles for educating on a historical event or marginalized group of people. But the vacuous opposite is just as bad, right? The tight, witty object poem that ultimately leaves you cold. The virtually asexual love song. The ones getting it right, I think, are pretty brave. They’ve learned something about how many boxes and bird cages and babies and goats they can pile onto the bicycle and still keep pedalling across the tightrope. They could run across by themselves, but then it’s just about them. James McMurtry has it down. He can pack Walmart, Iraq, George Bush, and small-town Texas into a song and it doesn’t feel clumsy.

In last month’s issue of Poetry, in an essay called “This Land is Our Land,” David Biespiel wrote about the shrinking interest in poetry in America and the reluctance of American poets to write about the issues currently facing Americans. He thinks there might be a connection. I’m inclined to agree, though it’s not entirely clear-cut. You can read the essay here, and check out the range of responses in the comments section.

On our side of the border, operating out of Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC, there’s a new journal in town. It’s called Ryga, after novelist and playwright George Ryga, who also has a more established award for social awareness in literature named after him. They’ve got two issues out, and another in the works. In his inaugural editorial Sean Johnston talks about the journal’s mission:

George Ryga wrote about this world now and that currency, that urgency is what we want to carry on here. Ryga will seek the best stories, essays, poems and plays in this tradition – the literature that our country is so rich in: literature that writes its way home without giving in to nostalgia; literature that celebrates all our competing traditions and resists any safe homogeneity; but literature that refuses to romanticize the voices of the past in a way that denies them a life in the present or the right to presume a central role in the future.

In “Ryga Redux,” the introduction to the second issue, Johnston rearticulates from the vantage point of having reviewed some submissions to a journal with this particular stated mission:

Since we first started putting together the material for Ryga, many people have submitted. The difference in submissions is shown most tellingly, I think, in the authors' notion of the political in art. This is where we differ -- art does not succeed very often when it shouts. It rarely succeeds when its primary audience is in the room, at the artist's feet. The scale of our world doesn't always allow us to work beside those who are suffering because of our material wealth, but they still suffer. We still feast. The true artist's imagination must keep those who suffer in the room with him.

It was hard to pick just one paragraph from each essay to include here. You can find both by following the links on the journal’s website.

In my own work I think I started out with a great willingness to expound on world as I saw it, and then as I got a little further along in figuring out how I say what I say, started to focus that mainly on things that were inarguably my own. I’ve felt inspired in the last couple of years to risk being a little clumsy again in order to say things worth saying. Some poems of mine will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Ryga, and I was thrilled when I got that news. But when I reread them now I think about the different ways I could have fit more onto the bike.